One Last Gift
by Cannibal Jello
Summary: They were almost to the end of their nightmare. They had almost escaped before betrayal stuck.


Title: One Last Gift

Author: cannibaljello at yahoo dot com.

Rating: PG-13 for death.

Disclaimer: I do not own Capcom or any of the characters mentioned in this piece of fan fiction. I am not making any profit off of it. Trust me, if I was, I'd be writing more than I do now.

Notes: I'm trying to get back on the writing bandwagon. It's difficult after you've learned from a very important person in your life that you're not worth the time or effort, doing something like this. I can't be sure if finishing this will work to keep me going...but it's a start...

...I give an oddles worth of thanks to my lovely guinea pig Sweetboxer, who survived reading it. He's such a brave (and shmexy) boy!

Oh, and italics mark thought processes...

* * *

Everything had happened so quickly. 

_And then, _he thought to himself. There was no one else but the dead. By now, they were all considered the same. _So slowly, watching you walk away. Run far away, as if you couldn't wait to get away from me. As if I was another of the diseased. And yet, slow it was not. It had never been. Time has gone by so quickly as it always has. It's just that so much time has passed since your presence left mine. Since you left me alone to die._

The adrenaline still remained, rushing through body and blood, unlike it had been so many heart beats before. Crimson had broken from skin, from a broken man trapped beneath a broken building, flowing into broken floor, each crack in cement a cuplet for wet copper wine. It was the same wine held inside that had gathered on his tongue in a mouth that had cried out in a broken voice, hoping that someone would hear him. That something would come and put him out of his misery. Hoping that somehow, it was so like the first sound he'd given when he'd fallen for the final time that he'd be back where he'd began instead of where he was then, at the end.

He was, in his mind, for the time it took the last moments of his life to replay inside.

It was a train wreck or a line of dominoes that David King had become one of, that so many had survived. The timed explosion had been beaten by seven but not by eight. For them, it had been a sharp escape. For him, it became sharp shards of glass and marble that gave birth to his grave, capturing him in it from the waist down, drowning all of them equally in soot and smoke, but had not damned all of them in the same way.

He'd tried. Like them, he'd tried. Tried so hard to make his feet follow the leader faster, except...It had been the typical leader behind him, with his .45 raised to render any followers and any beings with the plans to meddle in their victory incapable with an aim that could cease any capture.

Up until then.

It had only been the two of them so far behind. Already, as they entered the final hallway, the others had been outdoors, stumbling over the scattered remains of UBCS before they reached the door set into brick walls to hide beyond the barrier of the University. It would be there that they'd be away from the raging tyrant that raced after the two remaining men, or so they thought...

They'd taken the monstrosity head-on. They'd tried to slow it down. And they'd succeeded, but also in slowing themselves own. At the entrance of the simple gray concrete maze, there had been sixty seconds left. There had only been three bullets left in the .45. Three bullets that did nothing to break the beast's concentration of the chase.

In turn, so many lost shots had taken Kevin's concentration away, with only fifty seconds left after that. With only fifteen rounds in the 9mm. With fifteen beats a second in their hearts, David feeling it in his raising, aiming hand. He'd put his heart into it. It was all they had left.

Forty seconds. Foot falling behind foot, backing up with Kevin passing him, his own hands reloading, knowing as well as David did that they couldn't risk the tyrant following them to freedom. And that they only had thirty seconds left and a mere five rounds.

There was too much to aim at. The face, frozen in an empty expression so full of death taunted David. The pulsing mass, wet and writhing against a chest like a parasite, giving the frightening figure life was obvious. Too obvious, and too protected by the metal cage surrounding it.

The flashes of gun fire was reflected to their left on the windows there, with a door to their right that would lead them to no where, as the tyrant thrust itself forward, feet gouging into the ground. And somehow, with twenty seconds left, they were out of time.

The trigger of the 9mm was weak beneath his gloved finger, thought the fight of the force of the recoil was unbelievable, and seemingly stronger than ever with each explosion taking place at the end of the barrel. If only it had been. If only the bullets had done more than cause the figure to stumble at the tick of their tenth second.

But it was enough. The six seconds remaining weren't. Not for him.

David remembered hearing Kevin say something, though what, he couldn't decipher, snapping his head in his direction only as the explosions began. It was then that he could feel the sweat of his body as it was flung from the skin of his face and bare neck, the black snake of his hair saturated in it as it leaped before falling heavily on his back. Nearly simultaneous to it, the gun fell from his hand to clatter empty and useless onto the ground that shook, the sound lost inside walls that swayed.

A grip took his arm, angry in its strength, a black hand sliding to grip his wrist to twist with the eagerness to take him from his feet before the explosion enveloped them-

-and then there was freedom, freedom from the fire, the two of them outside now where the wing smelled like a premature October, the bursting of bombs wracking and wrecking the world around them like the destructive rampage of a god trying to turn the surrounding mountains to dust with the aftershocks.

It had been a god that had hated him, one that delivered his punishment and fate in the form of falling debris that came from above.

Kevin had yelled as he was thrown from his feet, his normally loud voice somehow quiet in the dawning night. And David, he'd screamed, his silence no more as he was instead pinned by his feet, then by his knees, his hips, his body blanketed by a hailing of hot stone and crystal that was both beautiful and deadly, the shapes of glass sharp as metal shrapnel.

In the end, the tyrant hadn't laid a hand on him...but something worse had.

David remembered darkness. Then a sound he could relate to as being that when ones ears are submerged underwater, as everything was a dull thud or a tap on hollow surrounding hard-surfaced walls. After a blank moment in time, he realized that he was being touched by the thudding sound, and that it hurt. His right cheek hurt. The rest of him ached. Then throbbed. Then ached and throbbed and brought him to tears with the intensity of it.

The next sound he heard was like a nail on a chalkboard. It made him grimace and caused him to reach to grip his ears in a frail attempt to escape. He wondered then, had he been underwater at some time? His gloves were wet after that.

He opened his eyes to look at them and saw Kevin instead, kneeling over him with an expression that was opened wide in shock to show something David couldn't describe beneath blue. Something that scared him, more than the sight of toppled stone covering half of his form. He felt more weighed down by the man watching him with the swim of that something in those sapphire irises, and the way they shook. How his voice trembled, too.

"...David..."

Besides the crackling of feeding fires, the night was near silent. The river could be heard in the far distance for being so near. Otherwise, the town was naked of sound. Naked of life. Naked of the hope to survive.

David demanded his mouth move, but the rest of his body did instead, like a panicked animal told to be calm, but it could not. It tried to run, tried to hide, but instead did in all its struggles when he simply could not compete with gravity and fallen granite.

Kevin grabbed him again with his broad hand, and then with those eyes full of the feelings of failure, full of the reflection of fire despite the one of the man extinguished inside.

"Don't...don't move, David."

When it finally came into existence, David's voice was a hiss. Had he expected it to come out any other way?

"Well what in the hell am I suppose to do!"

There was blood on his tongue; he could taste it. It hurt to talk because he'd bitten it. Still, that didn't explain the rest of it, shining like polish on the rubble. David didn't know what did.

Kevin studied him for a moment, his eyes soft as they searched his face. David had soot in his hair. The skin at one side of his face was scraped. More than a single hair was out of place. He looked like shit.

Telling him wouldn't have been the best way to calm him, the cop thought. Instead, he lifted one hand and lowered it to the bound blackness of his hair, smoothing it gently, slowly, and with equal care, brushed the shorter silk of his bangs to the side of strongly chiseled cheekbones.

The way the long thick lashes fluttered gave Kevin's fingers new strength. They brought him the power to stand on his legs again. Kevin hoped it was enough and that the force he felt was evident in his voice.

"Stay still."

David did. He had few other choices to make. And so, to their dismay, did the figurative ears of the stones. No matter how Kevin, for all his breadth, shifted his weight, he could not lift them. He could shift them, which told him that with help, David could be freed. That Mark, being the large man he was, could help Kevin lift them, along with the plumber, to his feet.

As if sensing the hope, something else lifted itself into the air, or some _things_. Wasps - half a dozen of them - their stingers dripping and quivering with the driving need to fulfill their raging fit brought by the fire that ate at their home and their hive.

For all the struggle he'd had with the weight, Kevin could move his own easily. He dove and escaped the charging aim of the buzzing beings, his own returning to what it had been all too long ago, their large bloated bodies popping like blisters at the puncture of .45 rounds. Not one of them had triedfor David or had had the chance to. Kevin, with only one round remaining, hadn't let them with his superior skill.

It had been the same skill that could have saved David. Could have saved him, if it had not been for the doubt in them that had made the full effect of the effort not enough when needed.

_How long have I been here?_ David wondered, back to present time and the state of mind, away from the memories for now.

Kevin was gone. He'd left to live and, in turn, had left David to die. He'd seen the helicopter and had run, reaching back for David only with his voice, not with a hand that was not eager to reload his gun.

He'd told him that he would return, in a way that had David believe him. But something about the way the wooden door shut to conceal that broad back told him that he wouldn't. It sounded final. It looked final. The ache in his heart agreed.

The way the devil had risen from red flames of brimstone, brick, and marble made it all too obvious that return was simply not an option after that.

The sight of the tyrant rendered David speechless from both fear and wonder. He found himself thinking how much stronger it had to have been to rear up from under so much more rock that had once covered its entire form when he could barely move in the amount, so small in comparison, collapsed across a mere half of his body.

It made no difference that he gave no sound to his fright. Thenoise of his heart must have been at a volume too high for his head alone, because somehow the tyrant sensed it. Smelled it. And did nothing because of it, as if it could feel the hopelessness. As if it could sense that he would not go anywhere, staring at him with gray eyes that seemed blind.

Would his own look like that when he died? David wondered. His own eyes were silver, but they were not blind...yet.

No, they were all too capable of capturing the sight of the abomination, with each detail outlined in putrid visible death.

_God_, David thought, watching it watch him. Both beady blackened eyes remained in their skull-like tomb set deep into a humanoid skull, but the realistic resemblance ended there. It had grown; the muscles more bloated than they'd been before, the bicep of its remaining arm rippling with twitching thick threads of scar tissue webbing that rode and rose like fingers to surround the left side's eye.

And that arm, that anchor-like arm, had doubled in length to make up for the lack of limb to the right of the rippling monstrous mass, the only sign of the structure being the slick, glistening, snapped remainder of bone protruding from an intact shoulder socket.

The tyrant had so obviously mutated, the deformed left arm nearly doubling the width of the whole form, with a hand as broad as the torso and so much more detestable, save for the shuddering, bubbling, still-beating mass of muscle that made up the organ now exposed there. It reeked of evil, seeped of it, spoke of it with its pulsing percussion, blooming from the broken protective cage it had been captured in before, but no more.

For the bass of that beating, the shriek of nails - no, not nails, but of bare _bone_ - was deafening as the tyrant moved and took its first step. It left a spray of sparks in its white wake as the cluster of finger-like claws gouged through the ground as if it was no more than liquid water. It was then that David knew only metaphors could describe such an unworldly being. It leaped like it could circle the world in that one jump, soundless and grotesquely graceful over the far-away gate.

Though the figure was visibly gone, David could hear it hit the ground. And then the screams began.

And then the bullets began.

And then the end began.

David could do nothing but cringe and strain in so many ways - to hear beyond the blasts of rounds and of that body hitting the ground again and again with each resulting earthquake beneath them.

Then he thought, _Alyssa, Cindy, Mark, George, Jim, Yoko...and Kevin. Kevin, God Kevin, you've got to come back and get me. You have to live._

He had to because no matter how hard his body tried, he could not be freed by it. And he felt so fucking helpless, because never before had he been forced to rely on anyone to survive. Not once.

He'd begun to think that it had been the reason he'd lived up until then, as time passed. As no one came back. As all sound but from that high above continued as the helicopter combed through the smoke in the air with whipping steel blades.

A blade; another reason he'd lived so long. He'd spent so many years embracing it,keeping it close for the time it would save his life again after the tragedies of his teenage years had passed. Now, even the blades were betraying him, lifting the helicopter away after it had drifted downwards to save them. To save the people that yelled for it and pleaded and finally had their wishes granted when it reached them. Then it had risen to save them. To damn him as it retreated.

With it, the present time fell onto him with a great gush of breath. Had he held it in the entire time? If so, had it been suicide he'd suffered for?

He'd already been murdered. He'd already died. And he'd listened to those that were guilty be freed. He'd heard Kevin calling to the rest of them to get on. He'd heard their calling to him, "Kevin, come on, get in!". But no one had heard David's.

_Save me..._

It had happened so long ago. For so long a time did David have to lay where he was, as he was, body twisted on the ground as he gripped at the sky, pleading for it to lift him to heaven from his hell with dampened silver eyes.

No, he would not be scared by the inevitable. In his opinion, the end had come too late. What worried him was why it had happened in such a way.

_Why, Kevin? Why did you leave? Why did you give up on me? All the times I'd been there for you. With you, when at first, I didn't believe in you, but...After all this time, I became envious of you, for being what I was not. For having what I could not: a future. A _smile_. A reason to wake up every morning without wondering why..._

_So here I am, wondering again. Why am I not good enough? To live? To be loved? You, if no one else, should know the reason unless, of course, you simply had none for giving up on me. For doing what you did._

_You let go. You bastard, you let me go and you left me to die here like a dog. So much for being a decent god damn cop. Even they care for their hounds. And so much for being a god damn decent friend. A companion._

_What did you tell them, Kevin? Are they your real friends? Or are they just like me, waiting, to see the truth that they are not? What would you tell them to keep them before you gave up on them? That you saved me? Surely not that you left me still breathing, still suffering...Or did you?_

_Were you proud? So proud of your fucking self for being so fucking perfect by the definition of a god damn book that you simply saw an easy escape and took the coward's way out to save yourself? Because if anyone had to survive, it had to be you, right? And if anyone had to die...it had to have been me._

_Did you do it to save yourself the trouble of saving me? Well then, if that's really what you wanted, then why didn't you do it in the very beginning? Why didn't you tell me that you'd give up on me?_

_And why, damn you, why did you wait until the near end to do it? Did you intend to be that cruel? To tease me with real hope and then drop me? You should have just injured me yourself._

But he had. Already, he had. Not physically...no, that, everyone else had already done. As for Kevin, he'd cut so much deeper than skin, than sinew, than tendon or bone or body, but into his soul.

And it was his own damn fault for letting it happen.

David shut his eyes and tried to detach himself from the world, wondering when he had become so damn vulnerable. Maybe it had been back at the bar when David had first seen the smile, both in teeth and the sapphire eyes he couldn't seem to forget.

_Grinning. Inviting. Not just on the outside. Is he smiling the same way now? Is he happy, being no longer afraid to be alive? Is he happy...being away from me?_

Or had it happened over the span of so many times he'd seen the same sight? It had been shown so often despite the surrounding of death when Kevin Ryman sat, smiling in the middle of it.

Then maybe...it had been whenhe'd had opened up to Kevin. After all the time fighting, snarling, threatening, and distancing...When Kevin had foundDavid in his own little furrow in the world where he had told him everything. Had told him why he was so ready to let death claim him as it had tried to too many times...as it did every day in his mind. How it had taken his heart before he realised that he'd had one. Surely, it had been ripped from him as all else had...

If that had been true, then it had been those hands that had returned it to him. Those bare hands, the black leather long bitten off and tossed aside, that had hugged him, Jesus Christ, _hugged _him and had helped him cry.

It had been the same hands that had coaxed him to die by leaving, leaving, as David realized, Kevin had before he'd really been physically absent.

_I should have expected it. Everyone leaves me eventually. Kevin, how could you? How could I think of you as an exception?_

David, deep within, knew the answer: because of those grins. Because of him being there in a way no one else had ever been. Because around Kevin and only Kevin could David find it within himself togrin after so many blank stares and years of blank expressions. Because the man had made him laugh and cry and feel so god damn _alive_.

Because...because Kevin, in the end, knew what was best for him. He knew what David had lived through, what he had lived with every second of survival. Kevin knew how tired it made him, how he no longer felt the strength to try and see another daylight. He could see how David was simply waiting for the day when he would no longer hurt, would no longer have to remember. When he could simply give up and give in to the freedom he'd always been in search of. The freedom he wanted.

What Kevin would never know was how deeply David respected him..and how much he'd come to love him.

He'd never know how David would have tried for him. How he would have survived if he could be with him. He'd never know how David thought of him now with such intensity and never, never how he hurt deep within wanting him, wishing...that things had been different.

In a way, David was also so very thankful that they _had_ changed. Never before had David been anything but numb to other people. It was ironic that Kevin, of everyone, would see into him, through him, and had David aching in so many ways he could never find the words to describe. Ways that brought him to tears of confusion...and happiness, the sole kind he'd never known before, brought on by Kevin. It scared him, scared him so badly that he'd become so open to any person, not just a man...

Yet...at the same time, he'd never felt more comfortable with himself. Like finding a religion that fit him, he had some sense of belonging. A sense of being and a sense of fullness after believing that he would never know the possibilities of rejection if he never made himself naked to them.

Maybe...David had broken down before Kevin, hoping that somewhere, sometime, somehow, he'd see David and appreciate him in a way no one had, no one would, no one _could_, not even Kevin.

_How could I have been so blind to believe you were capable of being any different?_

Most importantly, and how David would most definitely know it was love, was that it didn't seem to matter how much torture he had to endure. How much hopeless longing he had to have, but how what Kevin never knew could never hurt him.

_So Kevin...you are truly safe now, away from me. You can be happy. You can be as you should be. As I want you to be. As _you_ want to be..._

As David was, both despite reality and because of it. He'd found both the failure of life and the meaning of it: to love.

_So I guess it doesn't happen quite that way, with your whole life flashing before your eyes...just what mattered most in it._

David saw the first smile again and he saw the last. He heard the first words spoken and those left with him in the end. He remembered the first touch and the final. And the sapphire, with all its different stages and depths...and realized that he'd never have to see those final moments in them, as Kevin would always be alive in his memories, safe from insanity.

Along with this would stay the memory of the daylight rising, so much more beautiful and capable of rendering David speechless as he knew it was his last. It was truly spectacular, as the night was still there, reluctant to leave. Some of the stars twinkled only for him in the distance, the fire of them bringing his heart faster despite how it was failing.

_Kevin, you're the reason these stars are so much brighter to me..._

And they only became brighter, bleeding in with the sun as if they were angels flying to the city to touch him. With them came the warmth of a mother and the fierceness of a father, giving David the first family he'd ever had.

_Thank you, Kevin._

With it was a flower that bloomed with fire, taking he dead away, leaving the promise and passion of new, true life.


End file.
